Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Too many dead, and for what ?
(November 10) - And it’s one, two, three what are we fighting for? Why are 2,200 fine young Canadian men and women still dodging bullets and land mines in southern Afghanistan?
Last August, Hamid Karzai declared himself the winner of an election that was exposed as fraudulent by United Nations observers. Ballot box stuffing, voter intimidation and corruption were rampant. The results were overturned. In any normal democracy, the candidate who benefited from, and possibly even encouraged and orchestrated, this outrage would be disqualified from future elections. Not there. Karzai was allowed to stand in a run-off election. His only opponent withdrew. The vote was cancelled.
Between the first and second failed elections, six more Canadian soldiers were killed. Two days later, an Afghan police officer shot and killed five British soldiers.
On Remembrance Day 2007, the Canadian death toll in this war was 72. Last year it was 98. This year, 133.
Tomorrow, as we stand for our moment of silence at 11 a. m., think about those 133 families. Parents, wives, children, brothers, and sisters all grieving. For what? To prop up a government that has no legitimacy? To secure a feudal society that prospers on the heroin trade?
Too many of our soldiers have lost their lives in that far-off land. It is time to stop and get out. The best support we can give our troops is to bring them home as quickly as possible.
The Canadian gun registry is all but dead. That is bad. Even worse is the feeble reasoning that led otherwise intelligent people to oppose it. Twelve were NDP MPs who ought to know better.
One, Charlie Angus, comes from a northern Ontario mining community. With his band The Grievous Angels, and a paper, Northern Miner, he fought strenuously for the safety of hard rock miners. He still does. I spoke to him on the phone a few times when I was at the Workers Health and Safety Centre in Toronto. I met him in 2004 when he came to support Phil Allt’s campaign. I thought he would have what it takes to stand up against the carnage of the gun lobby. I was wrong.
What was the worst of the foolishness? One example: the long gun registry makes criminals of honest hunters and farmers. It doesn’t.
Some farmers say they need rifles and shotguns. Maybe they do. They also need pickup trucks. They don’t object to registering the truck. Why not register the gun?
Another piece of nonsense –and some think they are being very profound when they say it –is that criminals won’t register their guns. Well, duh! No kidding. The second half of this half-thought is that the gun registry won’t stop gun crimes. What a shocking revelation.
Guess what? Laws against bank robbery don’t stop people from robbing banks. Laws against domestic violence don’t stop husbands from shooting wives when that’s where their insecurity takes them.
The gun registry was never intended to stop anything. It was designed, among other things, to let police know if there is a gun in the house when called to a domestic disturbance.
It was poorly managed. That is reason to fix it, not to scrap it. Frank Valeriote, our MP, voted to keep it. Good for him. Eight of his Liberal colleagues, 12 of my fellow New Democrats, and all the Conservatives voted to abolish it. Shame on them.
One tragedy is the erosion of gun control a month before the 20th anniversary of the Montreal massacre. A second tragedy is the triumph of false logic and shallow thinking. That, unfortunately, is the temper of our times.
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